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libscie / liberator

Public access to the public domain is not a given --- in order to ensure this, this project aims to identify and liberate scholarly works that have expired copyright and are in fact public domain.
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Liberator

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Welcome! This project aims to ensure public access to the public domain, for everyone and for any purpose. Drop us a line on gitter if you want to join the community of liberators! You can get an idea of what the end result of the project hopes to be here

Join the chat at https://gitter.im/libscie/liberatorBuild Status

Description

Public access to the public domain is crucial, but not a given. A public park is public domain, but it can be subject to access restrictions (for example, not after dark). With information, it makes no sense to us that access needs to be restricted, because copying costs virtually nothing and has much potential.

So why is this a problem? Example: this research paper from 1871 can be freely available and reused, but isn't. Why? Because no one has made it available. This is just one of the 594,375 that are easy to identify as public domain of which public access isn't sure.

Project steps

That is where this project comes in. There are three steps:

  1. identify what can be liberated

  2. get access to those

  3. deposit them and start spreading

The end-goal of this project is a website where the user gets prompted to upload an article that can be liberated, if they have access (or can get access). All it requires is a quick download from the publisher, and upload to the website --- Liberator takes care of the rest. A non-working demo of the Liberator project is available here. This is what we want to get working as a community.

Contributor guidelines

Looking to contribute? Great! We work on a Pull Request basis, but if you're unfamiliar with Github and spotted a mistake, please feel free to e-mail your contribution. Being familiar with Github is not a prerequisite to contribute (if you want to learn go here).

If you feel that your contribution is rejected for improper reasons, please contact Achintya Rao, who will try to resolve the issue with the maintainers. Please also respect the community guidelines in general interaction in issues, etc. See the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines that we also adhere to.

Specific contributions are greatly appreciated. We try to keep our issues page up-to-date so you can find specific tasks that can be completed there. Feel free to pick and choose what you feel you can contribute to!

At the moment, we can really use Django-skilled developers, database engineers (PostgreSQL) and deployment specialists (we want to deploy to Heroku).

General, non-specific contributions that are always appreciated (not exhaustive :godmode:):

  1. code reviews
    • we all make mistakes, and so do we. Notice a mistake, no matter how small? Suggest a change.
  2. ideas
    • we don't pretend to know all the answers, we just try to work towards them. See us go in a wrong direction? Stop us by providing us with your constructive insight. Submit a Github issue on the relevant project, or e-mail us.
  3. text translation
    • we prefer to have text available to everyone in their native language, because this makes it much easier to understand the content. Any contributions for translations are greatly appreciated, but are limited to Pull Requests initially due to the amount of work.
    • but if you don't feel confident about translating and would prefer us to provide our content in your language, e-mail us and we'll keep a vote count. Each time a language gets 100 votes and we cannot find a contributor to translate, we'll actually hire an official translator. A digital vote count check might be something we make sooner rather than later.
    • we commit to maintaining up-to-date translations for new pages once a translation for a project has been added.